Globalization: Annotated Bibliography

Gills, Dong-Sook. (2002, May). "Globalization of Production and Women in Asia."

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 581

(Globalization and Democracy Special Issue): 106-120.

Gillis Dong-Sook (2002) in her article "Globalization of Production and Women in Asia" asserts that globalization has fundamentally shifted the relationship of women, work and power in the developing nations of Asia. In her analysis of the economic, political, and cultural impact of globalization since the 1970s upon the region she uses a primarily data-driven, panoramic rather than specific and anecdotal approach to suggest that the borderless economy has created a new organization of production processes. Gillis wishes to show that rather than exploiting the developing world, technological advances and neoliberal ideology have empowered formerly disempowered persons, altering traditional labor relations by giving women more labor options and economic power. To feminists and liberal academics hesitant about some of the effects of globalization, Gill wishes to show the positive elements of the new economy in expanding women's economic and social leverage in many Asian countries.

Freeman, Carla (2001, Summer). "Is Local: Global as Feminine: Masculine? Rethinking

the Gender of Globalization." Signs 26(4): 1007-1037.

Carla Freeman's (2001) intriguingly titled theoretical article "Is Local: Global as Feminine: Masculine? Rethinking the Gender of Globalization" is designed to refute what the author sees as the insufficient emphasis upon gender relations in current anthropological globalization analysis. She offers a critical review of the anthropological literature of globalization to encourage a paradigmatic shift in the way that culture is conceptualized, combined with a specific case study of women's role in the Caribbean 'higgling' trade (higgling is an Afro-Caribbean method of smuggling consumer goods and selling them on the black market at a cheaper, untaxed price and often uses women as middlepersons, deploying what Freeman calls a canny bantering and negotiating style much prized in women of the region). The author's primary intent is to dispute research approaches that reinforce gender binaries and present women of the new global economy as traditional and rooted as opposed to men who are supposedly more mobile and modern in their means of sustenance. The tone and vocabulary of the article is quite academic, and requires the reader to be somewhat familiar with feminist theory and its notions of constructed binaries of gender, but her critique of the rhetoric of globalization would make it interesting to a wider academic audience.